I am not a Mac fanatic. I am not a Mac fanatic. I am not a Mac fanatic. I am not a Mac fanatic. I am not a Mac fanatic.

Sure, I spent my Friday evening trekking up to UCLA to buy Apple's new OS within 30 minutes of it officially being available (8 p.m.) and then the next three hours or so installing and playing and configuring and testing and crashing and rebooting and doing some more playing, but I am not a Mac fanatic.

Anyway, against all reasonable safe computer practices I did the Panther immediately upon its release. Like most rational people I had planned to update once the bleeding edge-ers had blown up their machines with all the bugs, and even figured I'd hold out until the first maintenance update (10.3.1?) was released.

Wrong.

I'm typing on Panther as we "speak." Overall impressions so far are very positive. I'm running a first-generation TiBook G4 (400 mHz/512/10) and it's by no means the sleek cat it was back in 2001. OS X up to this point had been useable but I was always nagged in the back of my mind by the fact that OS 9 just felt "soooo" snappy on this machine. Well, Panther feels close to "sooo" snappy -- menus really pop down, Finder windows resize well, dialogue sheets crisply appear and disappear, opening new windows is great. I really pleased so far.

All applications seem to be compatible. In a nice bonus, they all seem to launch noticeably faster than under Jaguar. Dreamweaver is especially invogorated under Panther, which is great.

Odd observations:
-- TextEdit really does know how to open basic Word docs and can also save its own files as Word docs.
-- The new Activity Monitor utility is great. It's like "top" on steroids.
-- iTunes and iPhoto are both much faster to launch, though neither was really updated for Panther
-- Safari is at v100 and is really, really quick (tough to get any faster, but it is...)
-- Fast user switching is not very exciting on my machine. No spinning/rotating desktop here. Must not have the proper graphics hardware (I told you this was an "old" machine). Oh well...

Only three temporary glitches: 1) had to re-enable php and I thought simply editing the httpd.conf file in BBEdit would do the trick. It didn't, but a quick Google search gave me the proper Terminal commands. 2) had to reinstall MySQL. Downloaded Aaron Faby's "dumb" installer, fiddled with things until phpMyAdmin told me everything was cool. 3) had a rare "hard" crash of the machine shortly after Panther got installed. Dunno what happened but I launched BBEdit and the machine totally locked up. After the forced restart it wouldn't boot all the way, getting stuck just before the Finder and Desktop appear. One more forced restart and things seem to be fine. Hmm...

Well, as you can see, it's after 1 a.m. Time to call it a night. Will do more exploring tomorrow.